A "Morning Ritual" for money

Hi, Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live and just hoping that everybody is dealing with being shut in more healthfully than a few of the folks that I see out there. And nothing but good feelings for everybody and the best thoughts. And I just thought that I'd confront some of these things. I know very, very well what it feels like to be totally stressed out. As some of you know, one of the instances was during the period of time that my family had to move back to Atlanta. Well, let me. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Stephen Barnes and I'm a, you know, variously a New York Times best selling writer and martial artist and husband and father. And the most important thing is that, you know, I really know what you're going through. I'm going through it myself right now. And in thinking about the. The various struggles that we're under, I am trying to address these things one at a time as realistically and directly as I can. Not because I'm so great, but because it's been an obsession with me for all my life to seek out people who could help me, who could find, who could share with me things that. And I think that if I have a genius, it is the ability to find people who could actually help me. So now what I want to do is just share that with you. I made a request that people share with me what troubles might be bothering them, what they might be going through right now. And one of my readers said the following thing says, I don't know why my need to just barely survive is a constant. I'm safe, but just have the very basics I want not to lack. And I want to not just teeter. Why am I okay with background acting with no advancement and definitely no income? Why am I okay with the bus? I'm really not. And I never used to be like this. At some point my feet got stuck in sand. Thank you. I am so grateful that somebody was honest enough to put into words something that so many of us feel. I can remember feeling totally stuck. As I said earlier, when my family had to move back to Atlanta to take care of Tananarive's mother, it was devastating to me. I had no balance to cope with it and I folded emotionally. Honestly, there was a moment at which I was literally curled on the floor crying, trying to figure out how in the world was I going to make my life work. I could not see the future. I want to share with you and talk to you about the tool that I used to help me out of that. And it was this thing that I've talked about the morning ritual and once I started applying it, it created the space I needed in my life, but also created the direction that I needed to be able to see what I needed to do next. And if I could move just one day at a time forward, just one day at a time, then I could take care of my family. So let's see how. First, let's define some things and let's talk about how the morning ritual could help with this specific issue. I think it might be best to deal with specific issues. I dealt with my specific issues and I've helped other people with theirs using this technique. But if I can help you guys with yours, it would be a great thing because all I really want to do is be as much use to you as possible. And by the way, see Dale there. Glad to see we both returned from the video vintage Paperback convention relatively unscathed. It's great to see you too. So what is necessary if you're not earning? This comment is about a lot of different things in general, but money is a major one here very clearly. Because if you can handle money, it implies a lot of other things. I mean, you make money by providing goods and services that other people value to the point that they're willing to to exchange their money for your time and energy. That's partially a matter of refining your skills and partially a matter of finding the people who need the skills and goods that you offer, and partially a matter of learning how to speak to them, to market what you are doing to them. And of course close the deal. Get the sale, get the check, get the money. But one thing that's very true about money is that just like relationships and just like your diet, you will not be able to lose weight if your self image is of a fat person and you will not be able to find love or you're going to find it hard to find love. If your self image is of someone who is unlovable. You literally will not believe it when somebody says I love you. You think well what's wrong with you? And it's difficult you to make more money than your self image says you should be making. So quite often and I think that hopefully you can see this illustration back here. This circle right here is who you think you are. This is who you think you are. And if you need to make more money, let's say you need to make twice as much money as you want. That's a nice round number. You want to make twice as much money, I'll break you completely out of your box. This is who you need to be in order to. To make that money now. And what I'm suggesting to you is maybe you're the bigger circle still, that who you really are is someone who could do vastly more than you believe you can. But we get crunched down. If you can believe that you're capable of vastly more than you're currently manifesting, then you will have the confidence that you need to sit out and, and do the things you need to do day by day to accomplish these things. Right now you might say, well, what if your goals are too high? What if you are expecting too much from yourself? Well, frankly, you might fail. But if you know that you will survive that failure, then once again, it's okay. So let's just take a look. First of all, you'll need to have a goal. The goal should be something that breaks you out of this box of who you think you are. That's who you think you are. The goal should break you out of that box. So a goal of, let's say, doubling your income would work pretty well because you're going to have to change a lot in order to double your income. It actually is. It's a challenging goal. It is a goal that says, you know, you want to fly and you haven't even chewed your way out of the cocoon yet. Okay? So once you have chosen that goal, then you have to say, well, what would it take for me to acquire this? Now, first, it's setting the goal. It's defining the goal. So I'm going to say smart. The acronym, smart SM Boy. S M A R T. S M A R T is what we're using here. I typed in S M, T A R T. Sorry. So what is smart? Smart is specific, meaningful, arg. As if. Now realistic and time boundaries. Now let's take a look and see what this means. Specific. You can't say, I want to make more money because money doesn't come in denominations of more. It comes in denominations of tens and twenties and hundreds and thousands. So if you say specific and I say double your income, then you take a look at what you earned last year and you say, okay, I've got an ego that says I'm worth $30,000 a year, $40,000 a year, $50,000 a year, whatever it is, okay, I want to double that to 60, 80, 100, 150, 200, whatever. Doubling it is meaningful. The goal has to be meaningful to you emotionally. Goals that your parents asked you to assume that society asked you to take on that your spouse asked you to take on aren't going to work if it doesn't have emotional resonance. You have to want it. You have to find the thing within yourself that says, I'd really love to be able to accomplish this because you are the one who's going to have to do it, right? So you have to have some emotional connection to it. As if now, when you visualize, you have to be able to visualize the goal. And ideally it's visualize it, hold it in your mind, in your heart, touch it, feel it, taste it, smell it. And it needs to be. Those visualizations need to be. Now, you see yourself cashing the check. You see the bank balance, okay, you see the car that you're going to buy, you see the house you're going to buy. You see whatever it is that would represent the goal. To be able to hold that vision in your mind tells your reticular activating mechanism what you're looking for, what you're selecting for. Once you hold that in your mind, if you do it consistently, then you're constantly looking for the thing that will move you towards that goal. But you have to do it consistently. Which is one of the reasons why, say, rewriting your goals every day is such a powerful technique. But I'm going to give you an even more powerful as if now, realistic. If anyone else has ever started from where you are and gotten the goal you want, it is realistic. That's what. Assuming that you believe that you're capable of learning, you're capable of growing, you're capable of achieving, you have to start. You have to believe that. But then if anyone else has ever started from where you're starting and gotten to where you want to go, it is realistic for you to have that goal. And there are times you say, well, no one's gotten this exact thing. Well, it doesn't have to be exact. It can be analogous. It can be something that is similar enough that you can wrap your mind around it. They don't have to win, you know, they don't have to get a particular car on a particular day, you know, and drive to a particular destination. But if anyone has ever driven a car to that destination, it's reasonable and realistic for you to think that you'll be able to, given, you know, similar cars and a skill of driving, the ability to, you know, have the money to buy the gas to get there, et cetera, et cetera. So don't be so specific that you're cutting your throat. Learn how to generalize it out. But it is true that the more carefully you can model the behaviors, attitudes, the beliefs of the person that you're thinking about, the easier it is for you to accomplish it. Okay, so then time bound, there needs to be a deadline. So you can say, by December 31, I will have earned twice as much as I earned in 2019 or something along that line, one year from now, my birthday, something like that. Because once again, your mind needs specificity. Now, when you create goals like this and you're specific, there is going to be a risk of failure. There's no question about that. But you will survive that. And not only that, but if you look at how you messed it up, you will learn. You will say, oh, okay, I should have done this instead of this. I could try more of this. I could do more of this. Let me find another role model. Let me find some more experts. Let me take a look at my plan. So those are the things that go into goals. And all those goals, all those goals fit into the I in the magic formula. So we'll come back to that. But I wanted to give you that as just a little piece because it's really important. I'm giving you chunks of things from the 5 Minute Life Hacks program. And what we do is we'll go to the big picture and then we'll say, well, you can use these tools and these tools and these tools, but the important thing is that you're taking daily action. If you were going to only do one of the things that I suggest, I'd hope for you to do the morning ritual. The first thing I suggest to people is the five minute miracle. Because the five minute miracle, every three hours, you stop and you breathe for 60 seconds. Deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing that actually helps you deal with stress, which helps you to cope with fear, which clears your mind. So you can be sort of in the center of the and you can see what can be done rather than just being so overwhelmed by fear and stress and anxiety that it feels like there is no hope and you're sliding down the razor blade of life, so to speak. Tom Lehrer reference there. All right, so you're going to use the magic formula in connection with the five minute with the morning ritual. And just as a reminder, the magic formula is that you need to have a map or model of what you're doing. Okay? So in this particular case, with your smart goal, you're going to need to find people who have increased their income doing something similarly enough to what it is that you're doing that you can model. You need to take daily action. Action is the. A daily action. That's the key. As long as you are, you know, success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal. As long as you can say, I'm closer to my goal today than I was yesterday, you, you're going to feel good about it. You're going to feel good. What is terrible and rips people apart is the sense that they are not making progress. You need a sense of gratitude for your life. If you don't feel happy, if you don't feel grateful for the blessings you've already received, how are you going to convince yourself that tomorrow is going to be better? If you can remember nothing except the negatives in your life, you will have no faith at all. And that means you're dead in the water. So a daily emotional flood of gratitude is just wonderful. So, and then the next step is intention. The I in intention that's going to be your goals. If you're the smart goals. And once again, I apologize for the messiness here. My bad. S M A R T your intention, the goals need to be clear. If you've done this, then your intention is clear. If you don't have clear goals, if you lack any of these things, you, you're dead in the water, really. And the last step is the conviction, belief that you can and should take these actions, that you can and should reach this goal. So if you have the magic map, action, gratitude, intention and conviction, and your goals are clear now you're prepared to move forward. Now you're prepared to step into your morning ritual. Now, your morning ritual said this many times before. You are moving, thinking and feeling all at the same time. You are moving, chanting affirmations and visualizing different things as you go. And you're going to move through this in a sequence that is not the same sequence as it is in the magic formula. This is a really great acronym, but I don't use it in that particular order. But you've got to cover these things. So you're going to be moving. I use Tai Chi. You can use walking, you can use yoga, you can use dancing. I think dancing would be great for a lot of people while you are moving. And it has to be while you are moving. Do not make the mistake of I'll meditate over here and I'll work in my journal over here and I'll exercise over there. That's fine. But the trick is that everything you actually are trying to accomplish in your life is Going to be a matter of all of those things coming together at the same time. To the degree that they do, you become like a human laser, all of you. What it is that you are moving in the same direction. Okay? So while you are moving, you start, and you start with a sense of confidence in yourself, a sense of confidence that you can learn, that you can grow. And I would use something along the lines of, every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better old. It works. If you're moving at the same time and you say that with power and conviction, it can be exceptionally powerful. Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better. Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better. Now, remember, this entire thing is designed for increasing money. So you could say, every day, in every way, I'm learning more and more, or every day in every way, I'm getting richer and richer. You could say that. But it needs to be something you're moving during that period of time. You're acting and moving as if you believe it. That's all, as if you believe it. So the next thing you do is you give thanks. So you go from conviction to gratitude. I'm so grateful for the things that you feel grateful for. Maybe everybody has things to feel grateful for. You just need to dig a little deeper. Anything that you would miss if you lost it, you should feel grateful because you have it now. So I'm grateful for my son and my daughter, the people who love me and trust me, my family, my beautiful, brilliant wife Tananery, my sister Joyce, my friends and my mentors. So basically, I will spend several minutes, you spend about equal amount of time on each of these, and it suggests about five minutes somewhere, two to five minutes on each of these. I'm so grateful for my role models. Now I. I'm talking about the role models who are going to give me the map that I need to get where it is that I'm going, right? So in my particular case, I'm grateful for Larry Niven, you know, my wonderful writing mentor for Steve Muhammad, my wonderful martial arts mentor for Dawn Callan, who helped me bring, you know, mind and body and heart all together in a spiritual sense. For Octavia Butler. These four people are the models that I need to fulfill what my goals in life are. Once you've clarified what your goals are, who are the people who can help you give thanks for them in your life, even if you've never met them, you've read books about them, you've read articles by them, you have YouTube videos, you have a sense of how do they move, how do they think, what do they say, what are their values? You're going to research them because you're trying to walk their path, right? So I give thanks starting over again. I start with a statement of belief in my capacity to learn and grow every day, in every way. I go from there to thanks for my family, the things that I'm thankful for. I go from there to thanks for my role model, and that is now we're starting to get a little trickier. Then I will literally give thanks for things that have not happened yet. I'm so grateful. Made X amount of money this month. And it's reasonable to start by increasing the amount of money that you earned in a month last year by 10%. By 10%. So using the map of the role model you've got, do you believe that if you did the things that they said to do, you could increase your income by 10%? That's all you have to do, increase your income by 10% a month. Once you've done that, then the next month you increase it by another 10%. Next month you decrease it by another 10%. And that's the direction. Any given day is going to be a matter of doing the things that you need to do that day. 10% more, 10% better quality, 10% better marketing over the course of a month. Right? So in any given day, you only have to improve. If you improve by 1% in one of those three arenas, you're okay. So how can I, you know, what am I going to do? If my goal by the end of the year is to double my income, then my goal in the month is to increase it by 10%. Then my goal today is just to get 1% better at 1 of the basic things that leads to that, just 1%, and to take those daily actions. So I'm so grateful for my role models and business partners and so forth. And I once again, I'm flooding myself with emotion at the same time that I'm visualizing and feeling, mentalizing, emotionalizing the endpoint, the thing I'm trying to do, okay? And I will go through this with all three major areas of my life, but one of the three would be business money. But I would also be with increasing my physical energy, it would also be deepening my connection to my heart and healing there. Then it would be, so I've gone through the map and the model gratitude. I have visualized the action I'm going to take today. I'm so grateful that I had a wonderful day today, that I worked out. I'm so grateful that I wrote at least a sentence today. I'm so grateful that I studied modeling today, that I studied marketing today, whatever it is. But make sure that you're looking at how your days fit into your weeks, fit into your months, fit into the year, such that if you could have a perfect day and another perfect day tomorrow and another perfect day the day after that, you've got it nailed. Now, the truth is. So we'll talk about the issues in just a minute, but. And then you wind things up so you've had the map, the action, gratitude, clear intention, goals. And you end up with all I need is within me now. And whatever the qualities that you believe that you need that would lead you to do this, that would enable you to do this, that would support you in doing this, that would take you out of the box that you're in, who you think you are, and allow you to expand at least this much to be able to fulfill the goal that you want. Now, if you can't think of what those qualities are. All I need is within me now. All the courage I need is within me now. You know, I like to use, you know, all the love I need is within me now. All the healing I need is within me now. And remember, I'm moving this whole time. For me, once again, it's Tai Chi. Okay, for you, it might be something else. But if you don't have a list of the things that you want to believe in about yourself, that you want to begin to imprint within yourself, then I would suggest that you might use, oh, the High Performance 6 that Brendon Burchard uses. You know, that's clarity, energy, urgency, or necessity, Productivity, influence, and courage. And courage. Those six things. If you have those six things and you've got the magic formula as your floor, you can accomplish just about anything. But the point is this, that you move as if you are the person who can accomplish this. For 10 to 20 minutes of your morning ritual, you are fake it till you make it. You are acting as if you are this person. You got that? That you act as if you give it everything you've got. Your voice, your facial expression, your body language. If you are insecure, if you don't believe in it, then raise your voice. Move with greater positivity. There will be a voice in the back of your head saying, this is ridiculous. This won't work. But if one of your goals is to exercise and you're actually exercising While you do this, you will be intimately aware of the fact that the voices in your head will lie to you. So that what I would do, I would start by clarifying my goal. I would make sure that I had a clear map of what I wanted to accomplish and a clear model of somebody else who got there. I would define the daily actions that would lead to the weeks, that would lead to the months, that would lead to the year. I would be sure to fill my heart with gratitude because you have to feel positive in order to do positive things. I would make sure that my intention was clear. Do I know exactly what I'm trying to accomplish and do I have an evidence procedure such that if I got it, I know that I had it? And conviction. Can I move and speak and hold my face and my posture just for 10 to 20 minutes as if I actually believed I could do this? That's it. That's the morning ritual. You do that for 10 to 20 minutes and you're done. Now this is what I would do that if I were to take a look at this. Let's go back to the statement was made. I don't know why my need to just barely survive is a constant. Because that's your ego identity. That's all you believe you deserve right now. On some level, what you're getting in life is based upon what you really believe you deserve and who you believe you are. I'm safe, but just have the very basics. That means that's all your self image holds. I want not to lack and I want to not just teeter. Why am I okay with background acting and no advancement and definitely no income? Because you have not defined yourself as someone who will not settle for that. You have not defined yourself as someone who demands more of life than that. To say, I am not going to go to bed any day until I have taken the step I need to take take to move myself one step forward. Your internal clock is set on survive rather than thrive. Why am I okay with the bus? Because you have not defined yourself as someone who drives a car. If you define yourself as a person who drives a car, then you will move heaven and earth to get a car. I'm really not and I never used to be like this. That means that life has hurt you. Life has knocked you down. And one of the things you do to get back up is you find people who are standing and find one who will extend their hand to you. We all get knocked down. We all need someone who is standing to help us back up. We all get lost. We all need someone who knows the way to draw us a map. I have been blessed to find many people who have drawn me maps, who have given me pieces of the puzzle. I've put a lot of those together in the 5 Minute Life Hacks program you can find at www.5minutelifehacks.com and you can get started with that for $3. I mean, really, seriously, we're doing everything we can to make this work for you. That's all I wanted to say today. I do think that it's best for me to take a look at the concerns that you guys actually have. So to reiterate again or to recapitulate, you start with the five Minute miracle to break the stress. You go from there to a morning ritual so that in the eye of the storm, you're taking the actions to create the life that you would love, the life that you need, the life that you deserve. If you've enjoyed this message, please share it. It's the only way we know what's working for you. And this is Steve Barnes for Life Writing Live saying, I love you guys. I want you to have the life that you deserve. I want you to be able to be a benefit to your family. You have supported me for so long, so many different ways. I just love having a chance to give back. Take.